How Glacéau Smartwater used data about the weather to serve up hyper-relevant content for its summer campaign

Using real-time data and targeted ads, our Glacéau Smartwater marketing team at Coca-Cola GB were able to reach fans with hyper-relevant, tongue-in-cheek content about the brand. Brand manager Bryony Lester and MediaCom associate director Gillian Blair talk through the summer campaign…

The challenge

Bryony: There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing which bottle of water to buy, it’s a very crowded marketplace. And because Glacéau Smartwater is a relatively new brand, awareness is always a crucial part of any activity we do. But we also wanted to give the brand a bit of personality and help it stand out on the streets, and on social media too.

Gillian: We wanted to be hyper-relevant to our Glacéau Smartwater fans, and serve them some content that was fun and contextually relevant.

Bryony: We started off looking at what Glacéau Smartwater stands for, and what our ‘Life Distilled’ tagline really means. Then we looked at the broader things of what our fans like to talk about, and how we can distil that content to make it local and hyper-relevant to the individual.

The campaign

Bryony: Everyone loves talking about the weather in this country, it’s a national pastime! So we took that insight and decided to give it our own twist by using targeted ads based on the current day’s forecast, along with the brand’s own tongue-in-cheek tone of voice.

Gillian: The campaign was carried out in two different places: Twitter and out-of-home (OOH), which means public spaces like billboards and buses.

Bryony: The Twitter part of the campaign involved a lot of social listening at first, to see if someone had tweeted from their mobile about the weather using an umbrella or sun emoji. We used a new feature from Twitter called emoji keyword targeting to track this. When a relevant tweet apeared, we'd then be able to serve them a targeted ad ("promoted tweet"), that was specifically curated to respond to that message.

Gillian: For example, if they tweet about how it hasn’t stopped raining all day with a rain cloud emoji, then we’ll serve them a Glacéau Smartwater advert that asks: “Pour weather?”

Bryony: Or if it was hot, as it was over the summer, and they were using the sun or sunglasses emoji, we could serve them something about the hot weather, for example “Sun’s out, tops off!”

Gillian: We were trialling different ways of using real-time data and targeting to be able to be as relevant as possible in that moment. We worked quite closely with Twitter to set up the data feeds that would allow us to update in real time. It was a very joined-up process.

Bryony: It was fun, tongue-in-cheek campaign that enabled the brand to standout a bit more and get seen by users while scrolling through their Twitter feeds.

Gillian: The OOH campaign was very similar and quite innovative at the time, because Glacéau Smartwater was one of the first brands to launch such a campaign.

Bryony: It involved many different ads, similar to the Twitter campaign, with different targeted creatives dependent on the weather, but these would be displayed on our digital billboards and posters.

Gillian: They would all be connected to something called an API feed (application programming interface), which updated all the time based on what the weather was like, and that would in turn change the advert accordingly.

Bryony: While it’s difficult to judge the effectiveness from our OOH advertising, we certainly saw strong engagement for the emoji campaign. We actually had a 120% uplift in click-through from the targeted ads, which was a fantastic result.